New Amsterdam
by trismegistus1
Summary: The most human contact he gets is during his bi-weekly forays outside, and even then it's with a politely-smiling Chinese woman selling him mangos.


"New Amsterdam"  
  
He lives in a tiny little cubbyhole of an apartment on Avenue D & 6th Street; he has a futon and a small fourth-hand television set that doesn't pick up channels broadcast during the day, because of the smog content in the New York air diffusing the signal.  
  
He shops for his groceries at the farmer's market in Chinatown every week, because he doesn't have enough money to buy food from anywhere else. D'Agostino's is a pipe dream for him; K-Mart is a pipe dream for him. He only get fruits and vegetables, ever, because his gas has been shut down, preventing him from preparing meat. Or fish, or poultry, or really, anything that requires heat in order to be edible, and really now, isn't that so damn fucking Alanis? He tried, once, to cook with his powers, but he didn't have the fine control necessary and ended up torching the single chair he'd managed to drag up from the street.  
  
This is what it's like to fight for mutant freedom; this is what it means to be a terrorist.  
  
All things considered, John had hoped for more.  
  
John walks the streets these days in something of a daze. He sees people slip around him like fish navigating around a break in the current, and after they streak past him he mocks up conversations with them in his head.  
  
_So yeah, Mr. Tall-Dark-and-Obviously-Fond-of-Sid-Vicious'-Hair, did you catch the Mets game last night?_  
  
But even then, after that, after the first few fumbled sentences in his head, the people collapse, the experiments fail. Because conversations require two people, or more, and as a rule of thumb are designed for execution outside the confines of one person's mind, and John: John doesn't have the energy to sustain them, in his head.  
  
The most human contact he gets is during his bi-weekly forays outside, and even then it's with a politely-smiling Chinese woman selling him mangos.  
  
Sometimes, he's stricken with the urge to speak with people on the subway. The last time he was on it, bobbing his head in time with the dips and lows of the train gliding over its tracks, a purple-haired girl with a nose stud tried to make eye contact with him. He nearly winked at her, before he caught himself and buried his face in the curve of his palms and started laughing hysterically; melodramatic, yes, but it conveyed the desired message, the girl had looked away, and never mind that John thought her pretty in a porcelain way, because his stop. Was next.  
  
A mind could collapse in on itself, with thoughts like these.  
  
Instead, this is what he does for fun, for a diversion: he goes to Central Park, the Met, the New York City Public Library. (Yes, he straddled the lions one night when even the city's dispossessed were nowhere to be seen; no, he never screamed "Who you gonna call?" at the top of his lungs, even though he sort of maybe wanted to.) He doesn't go to these places out of any sense of community with the teeming throng of humanity that surges around him constantly, perpetually, invading his senses and assaulting his sense of personal space--but because they're free.  
  
Well. Free as such things are. The Met. Suggested donations, they have, and while John feels a little guilty that he's skulking around the Met taking in the swoops and curves of Brunelleschis and Caravaggios for fifty cents on the dollar, he figures that if the place was really strapped for cash, it would case one of the big naked Greek man statues that are all over the place.  
  
The days go by like faces on the subway. They run together like ink, seeping through paper--one day, a week, and suddenly it's been half a year living in a loft that might generously be qualified as a cell. He's lived alone in the city now for a little over six months; the last night he saw Erik, the man had handed him a cellphone, uttered a single word ("Wait," pronounced the way Erik pronounced everything, like gravity bending the sides of his mouth), and slipped into Gotham dreaming without so much as a fare-thee-well to John.  
  
It's okay, though. He had been getting used to it. Up until last week.  
  
A week ago, on the subway back from the Met--riding the subway back being one of the few indulgences he allows himself, and   
  
fuck Mayor fucking Bloomberg for the fare hike that's effectively cut the number of trips he can make on the 6 down by a third--he overheard some flatscans talking about something happening on the west coast, in the city most near to the rising sun: San Francisco.  
  
Explosions. Property damage. Leather.  
  
Mutants.  
  
Naturally.  
  
So he got off before his usual stop and walked into the Circuit City on Union Square, where a cluster of people were situated around the widescreen TVs, watching the tail end of live and breaking news, and John got there just in time to see what he recognized as an optic blast punch through Erik's shields and send the old man plummeting down into Pacific blue.  
  
The flatscans murmurred their approval; leveled invectives against the damn mutie population; brushed up against John as he stared blankly at the instant replay of Erik falling into the western sea.  
  
John went straight home, after that, and hasn't left the apartment since.  
  
He still has the cell phone with him. Presumably it can still make outside calls. Maybe even non-pseudo-supervillain-related ones. It used to be able to; he has made one on it, once, an order for Malaysian food from a place down on Bayard, back before he realized that Erik wasn't depositing any more money into his bank account and that nobody was coming to sound the call to arms any time soon.  
  
Last night he tried dialing Erik's number; he got a click, a three-tone beep, "The number you've called has been disconnected, and its owner dashed against the rocks that guard the San Fransisco Bay. Please hang up and try again."  
  
There's nobody else he can call; Erik insisted on complete and total autonomy in his cells. It's like some horrible secret Ivy League frathouse gone wrong--the only other mutant who knows you is the mutant next to you in the chain. Still, he knows where a few of his peers are, if not necessarily how he can ring them up and ask them over for a barbeque and the game. A few cities over, in Philadelphia, there's a terrakinetic waiting for Erik's order to bring the City of Brotherly Love to its knees (heh, and John laughs and makes a joke about death knells and the Liberty Bell, even though nobody's there to hear), but John has no way of getting in touch with him.  
  
He has no way of getting in touch with anybody.  
  
Once, at the obelisk next to the museum, he thought he saw Bobby and Marie. That was--difficult. He had been lounging, sitting on the sign that said "Do not touch the obelisk," and his fingers were tracing the glyphs that told the story of Ra Sun-God, Most High, riding alone across the sky. He had heard a boy say a name that sounded like Marie, and John's ears perked. Because nothing had pricked his ears so in weeks, months, and when the mind is locked in a box like his had been it seizes upon notes of familiarity it strikes out in unexpected ways. And he looked up and there was Bobby with his spilled sand for hair and Marie with the way she tucked her hair behind her ears--  
  
--and when John leapt from his seat atop the obelisk's legend, one hand already up in salutation and a wicked, stupid smile curling his lips, the boy had turned and the girl had laughed and Bobby and Marie vanished. The light caught different-like on the girl's hair, the boy's nose narrowed to a sharper point than Bobby's ever did, and John went back home to his vegetables and his futon and the cinders of his chair.  
  
It's not so bad, at night; then, the sky clears and the air thins just enough so that the schizophrenic box of circuits and plastic that he calls his television set is able to receive a steady signal. Then, he channel-surfs between Leno and Letterman and he banishes the thoughts of Bobby and Marie, and John waits for a call that he suspects will never come. 


End file.
